Social Media Marketing Success – How to Measure It Objectively

The power of social media platforms cannot be understated. Today, a significant majority are on the various social media platforms that exist, and this has forced businesses to turn to these platforms to market and promote their products and services.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are among the social media platforms that businesses are turning to as part of their marketing efforts. Success in social media marketing can be hard to measure since these platforms are continually introducing new features and modifying existing policies. This, therefore, calls for concise methods of measuring results regardless of the updates that the platform’s release.

Measuring social media marketing success involves coming up with the appropriate yardsticks and metrics. These metrics can help marketers to track their Return on Investment of their social media marketing efforts, and determine whether they are achieving success or progress of any kind.

Accurate measurement and tracking of metrics not only helps to extract meaningful information but also helps to unearth mistakes and wasted chances.

Engagement on the Respective Platform

Primarily, a lot of conversations and discussions go on social media platforms. On Facebook, users like to share and comment on posts. Twitter users love, retweet and share tweets, all actions on these platforms stimulate discussions among active users.

The number of users who talk about your product and service on social media may not be significant, but it can help you to uncover areas where the reach of your product is unsatisfactory. Promoting a business on social media is targeted at roping in more users to know and talk about the product.

An ideal social media post by a business will include a brief statement on the product and a link to a site where users can find more information about the product or service. In most cases, the number of link clicks is an important yardstick in the measurement of social media success. On Facebook, the Facebook Insights feature allows you to track clicks on your post, but you can also check specific link clicks on the post.

Link clicks can help you to get an insight on the number of users who visit your site for more information. You can track the success of your social media marketing campaigns by analyzing and monitoring link clicks.

Tracking the Reach and Impressions

Social media marketing is broad and goes beyond posts and links to websites. If you are interested in creating advertisements on these platforms, then you will need to have another set of metrics altogether. In the world of social media ads, the reach refers to the users who see a particular post, while the impression entails the number of people who see an ad.

Stern and Company can help in tracking and analyzing how the users view and react to your posts and ads. Depending on your needs, these numbers can help you track your social media marketing efforts. If the purpose of your campaign is to attain a pre-determined number of users viewing the ad, the reach of your ad can be a fundamental metric in this scenario.

On the other hand, you can use impressions to measure your social media efforts if you have set your eyes on a given number of users on a number of people to whom you intend to show the ad.

Tracking Button Click Numbers

When you use ads in social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, button clicks that prompt the viewer to take action are always embedded. These button clicks vary from platform to platform, and you can track and analyze the clicking rates of these buttons using inbuilt features like Facebook Ads Manager in the Facebook platform.

People who view these ads and click these buttons show a high interest in the advertised product or service. Most importantly, conversions from these ads indicate the attention of users to a particular product. Depending on the extent of the conversion rate, you can get an overview of your social media marketing efforts.

Track the Growth of Followers

Your business is on social media because you want to create a huge following or even promote your brand to users. A vast audience indicates that more and more people know about your business. Further, it can also be a sign that people are recommending your products to other people.

This metric can help you to track your social media marketing success. A considerable following shows that you are succeeding in your social media marketing efforts. On the contrary, a stagnating or decreasing audience is a sign that you are not doing well in your social media marketing strategy.